Modern Empire. Although the Japanese engaged in the creation of a modern empire of diverse peoples in neighboring Asian countries and areas, beginning in the late 19th century, back home there was a strong belief in national homogeneity. All Japanese hearts were supposedly beating as one—one nation, one race. The Japanese had adopted the term, minzoku to conceptualize race: the Japanese race as distinguished from the Korean or Chinese races. This belief is further reflected in such designation as naichi (interior) for the homeland and gaichi (outlands) for colonies and territories. To use an older but still useful theoretical concept, Japan’s nearby Significant Others were the Taiwanese, Koreans, Manchus, Siberian Russians, mainland Chinese, and to a certain extent Okinawans. Japan had acquired Taiwan (then a prefecture of China) as a colony after the Sino-Japanese war of 1895. It expanded into Korea (an independent state) by turning it into a protectorate during the Russo-Japanese War, 1904-05, and annexing it in 1910. As war spoils, it had also acquired the southern half of Sakhalin Island (Karafuto) in 1905 and a leasehold at the southern tip of Manchuria, a vast and contested area of minerals, forests, grasslands, and grain fields. Japan’s Kwantung Army was sent to guard the corridor connecting Japan’s South Manchuria Railway to the Russian Trans Siberian Railway. In the 1930s, after the Manchurian Incident of 1931, Manchuria was recreated by the Japan’s military as Manchukuo, a Japanese puppet state of great potential wealth and outlet for migration of whole Japanese households and villages.

Japan Proper. Within Japan proper, there was long-standing discrimination against a large Japanese minority of at least one million (perhaps two million), the burakumin, or people of the separate wards and villages who engaged in what were considered to be defiling occupations. Ethnically and racially, they were the same as mainstream Japanese. To the north in Hokkaido was a separate hunting and fishing population, the Ainu, who were linguistically and culturally distinct from the Japanese. A smallish community of about 30,000, they had been relegated to reservations in the late 19th century, much in the manner of indigenous Indians of North America, and had lost lands. Other Ainu lived in Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands. To the south were approximately 190,000 Okinawans, who were linguistically close to the Japanese but were treated as second-class people in matters of education and public works. They were looked down upon as country cousins if not as quaint or exotic. The first wave of Koreans to go to Japan for work or education in the colonial years included a few women. The men either brought or called for their Korean wives; a few intermarried. Tens of thousands of Korean and Chinese civilians were forcibly brought to Japan as conscript labor in mines and heavy industries during the Asia/Pacific War. In wartime Japan, the resident Korean population became very large, growing perhaps to 1,800,000 by 1945.

Japanese Colonial Women. Japanese women as well as Japanese men were participants in the great game of modern empire. At home, few women, including activists, seem to have become involved in publicly questioning Japan’s imperial role. In the same manner as their Western counterparts, they went to the colonies and territories as wives and daughters of colonial police and administrators; also as teachers, travelers and adventurers, servants, writers and artists, and as prostitutes. Some Japanese families who had lived more than one generation overseas came to love their land of birth; they were more comfortable in Dairen, Manchuria, or in Seoul, Korea, for example, than Tokyo or Osaka. Although the roles of Japanese colonial women generally were decided and mediated by men, nevertheless they too developed attitudes of superiority toward colonial peoples, including colonial women. This is often forgotten in studies of the plight of Japanese women during the Occupation period when the tables were turned and the Americans and Allies looked down upon Japan as a defeated and misguided nation and took advantage of Japanese women.

Occupied Japan. After August 1945, Japan lost its territories, and as its overseas population came home from colonies, battlefields, and labor camps. According to statistics published in the Nippon Times, by 1948 close to six million Japanese had been repatriated of a projected seven million. More than half a million remained in Soviet prisons (previous estimates of 900,000 Japanese may have been too high). Over one million Formosans, Koreans, and Chinese had been evacuated from Japan to their home areas. Efforts had been made to send Okinawans back to the Ryukyu Islands, which were then under direct U.S. military control. Still, a significant minority problem existed for Japanese and Occupation officials to recognize and try to solve. The immediate question was the extent to which Japan’s minorities, both home grown and foreign, would face oppression and discrimination. Would they, in fact, benefit from the economic and political democratization of Japan? Unfortunately, it is difficult to pinpoint minority experiences, especially women’s lives, from existing materials for these years, 1945-1952. Here, nevertheless, is what we can say.

Resident Korean Women. In 1945 and after, the resident Koreans in Japan (zainichi Chosenjin) were not only alienated from their former colonial masters, the Japanese, but were themselves a divided minority. Their country, though technically liberated in August 1945, had been split between the military forces of the Soviet Union and the United States, creating North Korea and South Korea. Because of the demands for forced labor in wartime Japan, they were the largest minority population. In addition, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Koreans were victims of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and of fire bomb raids over Tokyo, Osaka, and other large cities. Organizations quickly formed in Japan representing resident South Koreans and North Koreans. Some of the Koreans who had been in Japan for more than one generation or had intermarried were reluctant to return to Korea. They were, in effect, Korean Japanese. Others, with difficulty, made a return either to the North or the South, then changed their minds and tried to return to Japan. Those who remained in Japan were subject to intense discrimination in housing, education, and jobs. Even today, popular sports figures and entertainers who have Korean lineage tend to use Japanese names.

During the Occupation, resident Koreans, led primarily by males, engaged in demonstrations for political and economic rights. They agitated for special Korean schools to educate their children. Occupation officials generally sided with Japanese authorities, if only to keep order and stability. To SCAP officials (Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers), Koreans were identified with demonstrations, disturbances, and violence. In 1949, for example, Koreans in Osaka, including Japanese supporters, were arrested by military police and tried for unruly public behavior. The press frequently carried stories, usually negative, about Korean protests. By law in 1952, Koreans lost whatever citizenship rights they had as colonials and became resident aliens. The number of Koreans in Japan had dwindled by then, but they remained Japan’s largest alien minority, tapering off at about 650,000 in the 1970s. Approximately 97,000 went back to North Korea under a special arrangement, 1959-1976.

But here our focus is on resident Korean women in Japan. Like many of the men, but more so, they were abysmally poor, illiterate, or had scarcely an elementary education. As wives and mothers, they faced double discrimination: abuse within as well as outside of the home. Love or romance was hardly conceivable; in the void, many, especially North Korean women, so we are told, developed a romantic passion for the handsome leader of Korean liberation back in their home land, General Kim Il Sung. Korean families in Japan had the added stress of the outbreak of the Korean War, 1950-1953, and division of families. In subsequent decades, Japanese Koreans lived a lower class existence and were subject to finger-printing as aliens and to loss of local and national voting rights. To pass, they used Japanese names. Conditions were even worse for the North Korean community in Japan. There was underneath the surface, dormant then but explosive later, of the abuse by the Japanese military of young women of Korea as military sexual slaves during the Asia/Pacific War. Becoming naturalized as a Japanese citizen was an extremely difficult process. But, in truth, it was difficult for any alien—Asian, European, or American—to become naturalized as a Japanese.

Burakumin Women. Although burakumin were Japanese nationals (that is, a minority of domestic origins) and entitled to equal rights under the 1947 constitution, their lives too were miserable. Only a few managed to make good money from their despised occupations in leather work, butchery, handling of corpses, or manufacturing foot ware. In 1945, they lived, as before, in separate farm villages or in segregated wards in towns and cities. Talk of equal rights had little immediate effect. Since they were undesirable to mainstream Japanese as marriage partners, detectives were employed (illegally after reforms) to check old family registers (koseki) for the lineage of prospective spouses, making it difficult for burakumin to enter mainstream life. A large percentage lived in squalid conditions in Kyoto, Osaka, and Tokyo. Conditions were harsh for burakumin men. For young outcaste women, prospects were even worse. During the Occupation, they became prostitutes or more often street walkers for GIs, called pan pan. If lucky, they became “only ones”—temporary mistresses or lovers of soldiers stationed at bases in Japan.

Burakumin had organized the National Leveler’s Society (Suiheisha) in 1922 to resist oppression and improve their lives but were forced to disband during the war. Drawing hope from the Occupation’s stated goal of democratization, the former leaders (predominately if not exclusively male) renewed their reform efforts in 1946 by establishing the Buraku Liberation National Committee (renamed the Buraku Liberation League in 1955). Their leader, Mutsumoto Jiichirō (1887-1866), a Socialist politician in the Diet, became Vice-President of the new Upper House of Councilors in 1947. Nevertheless, burakumin, though numbering one or more million at the time, have been accurately termed Japan’s “invisible race.” It bears repetition that the public and interior lives of burakumin women, as told in their own words, have not been sufficiently addressed. Author and civil rights activist Sumii Sue (1902-1997), who grew up near a burakumin community in the Nara area and went to public school with outcaste children, took an early interest in their plight. A children’s writer in the prewar period, she published the first of her multi-volume and best selling anthology on burakumin life, The River with No Bridge, in 1961. However, it covered only the childhood years of her characters in the early 20th century. Seven volumes later, in her early nineties, she was ready to tackle what happened after 1945 in volume eight, but did not live to tell us. An interview with her in English fails to probe these years. Fiction by Nakajima Kenji (1946-1992), an acclaimed postwar burakumin author, dates from the mid-1970s. He was from an impoverished village in Yamagata Prefecture and was born just after the Occupation began. The sexual fantasies in his complicated stories are told from the viewpoint of male characters.

Ainu Women. Foreign and Japanese anthropologists had taken a great interest in the Ainu people back in the late 19th century and had done considerable field work by 1945. Catholic and Protestant missionaries, too, had worked among them. It was well-known that their spoken language, customs, folklore, and even physical features, were different from the Japanese, leading to speculation (now questioned) that the Ainu were the original inhabitants of the Japanese islands in the prehistoric period and came from somewhere in Northeast Asia. Photographs, drawings, and sketches of Ainu men and women appeared frequently in scholarly and travel journals, featuring their facial tattoos and the colorful patterns of their clothes. Ainu men of the older generation invariably were heavily bearded. Ainu material culture was on display in museums in Europe, North America, the Soviet Union, and Japan. Since the late 19th century, most Ainu lived on reservations in the northern island of Hokkaido. Efforts by the modern Japanese state to change them from a hunting and fishing people into agriculture had not been successful. Most Ainu stayed in Hokkaido, but some migrated to Tokyo and other big cities. In 1933, they had acquired citizenship. From 1936, they were required to attend regular Japanese schools and were discouraged from using their own language. The Ainu were confronted in the postwar period with profound questions of ethnic identity, cultural legacy, and assimilation. As a result of intermarriage, the population of full-blooded Ainu had already begun to decline to 30,000 or so by 1945; recent statistics estimate only 25,000 Ainu.

Occupation authorities too were curious about the Ainu, and their villages were put on the tourist list for foreign visitors to Hokkaido. The Occupation’s agrarian reforms apparently brought little relief. About 200 leaders held an Ainu Convention in February 1946, to which some of their women were invited, and attempted to bring their problems with land reform to the attention of SCAP. In superficial ways, Japanese and foreigners continued to learn about the Ainu bear culture and spirit world. In common with their predecessors, they took numerous photos of Ainu chieftains, houses, and material culture. Far less was unearthed—or offered—about the personal lives, experiences, and aspirations of Ainu women in the Occupation period. The usual generalizations apply for the older generation: Ainu women were subordinate to Ainu men, though often accorded respect as elders or grandmothers. In the prewar years, tatoos around the lips of women were begun at an early age and completed by marriage. After 1945 (and even before), this was dropped for girls and young women. Also, before marriage, all women were expected to develop skills in making clothes and in food preparation. Wood carving was reserved for the world of men. Some Ainu women with special qualities carried on the ancient practice of shamanism as health healers. We know, for example, about Aoki Aiko (1914-1995), who began her career as a midwife in 1933 at the age of nineteen and soon developed powers to deal with pain. Other Ainu women were revered for preserving or reciting tales from the Ainu epic. Kannari Matsu (1875-1961) was one such woman. A convert to Christianity, she traveled to Ainu communities, collected and memorized stories, and later transcribed them into the Roman alphabet in the 1920s and after. Another was Kimura Kimi (1900-1988), a highly respected teller of Ainu legends. Sunazawa Peramonkoro (1897-1971), who was married to Ainu leader, Sunazawa Ichitarō (1893-1953) and joined him in prewar protests against unequal treatment, became a master of textile design in her own right and a reciter of poetry. Their son, Sunazawa Bikky (1932- ), a prominent postwar painter and activist writer, carried on their love of Ainu lore and crafts. He recalls:

It came to me [in 1948] that the Ainu shouldn’t have to suffer for poor self-consciousness to the point that many Ainu had to hide their identity. I couldn’t confront the racial prejudice against the Ainu until I could get rid of my own inferiority complex. Rather than hiding behind my Ainu-ness, I thought I should grapple squarely with it. It was then that I made up my mind to use my childhood nickname, “Bikky” [Ainu for frog] instead of my real [Japanese] name, Hisao.

In the 1970s, young Ainu women and men, the beneficiaries of a right to nine years of education under the postwar Constitution, became more active in Ainu causes and demonstrated for their rights as a distinct ethnic group in Tokyo and other cities. No Ainu—woman or man—was elected to the Diet in this period or for decades in the future. Finally, in 1998, Kayano Shigeru, founder of the Nibutani Ainu Memorial Museum and a leader since the early 1950s in the movement to preserve the Ainu heritage and identity, was successful in winning a set in the Lower House in 1994. Though Ainu were citizens and entitled to equal rights under the 1947 constitution, they, along with other minorities, did not benefit from Japan’s subsequent high economic growth. In 1999, a magnificent exhibit of Ainu life was held at the Smithsonian Institutions. In the catalogue, Keira Tomoko, who was born during the Occupation in 1947, tells a loving tale (see “The Heart Fuchi Conveyed”) of reviving her Ainu identity in postwar Japan.

Other Minorities. Gaijin is the word Japanese adopted in the 1860s and after to designate a wide variety of outsiders, Asian, African, and Western. As indicated, Taiwanese, in large part, were returned to their home island by the Occupation. Chinese laborers from the mainland too were evacuated. Those who remained in Japan shared the trauma of survival and reconstruction with the Japanese. In the future, numbering about 50,000, they would be seen as a model minority. Japanese would come to view the reconstituted Chinatowns of Yokohama and in Nagasaki as fascinating enclaves to visit and enjoy, but during the Occupation these were grim and desolate places. Technically speaking, the Okinawans were not a minority, though this is arguable. In this period, until 1972, they were under the direct control of the American military. Physical assaults and rapes by American soldiers stationed in Okinawa did not create headlines until the 1990, although they occurred much earlier. Mainland Japanese retained notions of superiority toward them. Much too little is known about Okinawan women in the period which coincides with the Occupation of Japan, 1945-1952.

Among the saddest among Japanese women minorities were the hibakusha, the survivors or the atomic bomb. Because of fear of genetic defect, they were deemed undesirable marriage partners, and engagements were usually broken. A special garoup, the Hiroshima Maidens, nine young unmarried Japanese women who had been disfigured by the atomic bomb, were taken to Tokyo for surgery in 1953. A select group of twenty-five came to United States in 1955 for reconstructive plastic surgery at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City and were hosted by Quaker families. Though grateful for American help and concern, sometimes patronizing but well-intended, they returned to a Japan which scorned them. One had died in surgery in the U.S.; two would soon die in Japan. The rest, twenty-two in all, survived for many years. Three, utterly miserable in Japan, tried their luck in America; one married an American. The remaining “maidens,” stayed single for the most part, though there were a few marriages, and did their best to transcend victimhood.

In addition, Japanese lepers and the disabled, about whom we know relatively little, were totally marginalized as a group and singled out as undesirable for progeny in the Eugenics Law of 1948. Another group targeted for discrimination was the mixed blood or biracial children of Japanese and foreigners, usually GIs, from the Occupation years and after. Their Japanese mothers usually assumed responsibility, even if impoverished, but many of the children ended up in orphanages. A few were adopted, primarily by foreign couples.

Among the foreign occupiers, African American soldiers in Occupied Japan were given a mixed reception. It was obvious to the Japanese that white GIs and officers did not treat the black soldiers as equals. In the opening period of the Occupation, they were relegated to separate barracks or segregated units. The Japanese too had problems with skin color and were hostile toward blacks, in particular to liaisons with Japanese women and any bi-racial offspring. However, they developed a high regard for sports figures, in particular boxer Joe Louis, and for black jazz musicians. Contralto Marian Anderson received a warm welcome when she gave concerts in Japan in 1953.

A Serious Gap. Existing English language literature on Japan’s minorities, especially minority women, does an extremely poor job on the Occupation period, 1945-1952. In memoirs, travel accounts, interviews, and scholarship, over and over it is the same: a large gap. It is almost as though the Occupation never occurred. Could it have been any worse than enduring the war itself and home front devastation? In existing narratives, we do learn a little about the war and the day of surrender. The suddenly it is 1955 or 1958. What happened in between? Kayano Shigeru’s account of the Occupation period (see “Ainu Memoir of the Occupation Years”) and his marriage to Reiko, who was also central to preserving Ainu crafts, is therefore of great value. But it is his story; not her story. The tale of Harukor, an Ainu woman, turns out to be about a fictional character of a much earlier century. But, thanks to the author, we also learn about a real Ainu woman of the 20th century. We also have a little information about Ainu women who have preserved oral literature and textile crafts. Among translations of Okinawan literature and poetry, there is nothing at all by women in the immediate postwar period. Some of the best literary work about burakumin is by sympathetic and concerned Japanese who grew up near outcaste enclaves, but it is rarely by outcaste women themselves. As for resident Korean women, we have a few oral histories from the war period and a great body of literature on Korean comfort women, but we know little from the Occupation period in the words of the first and second generation Japanese Korean women. In helping to fill this significant gap, students will find essential primary materials in the Gordon W. Prange Collection in the University of Maryland Libraries and at the nearby Archives II, College Park, Maryland.